Microsoft says more than 14 million devices are running its Windows 10 operating software since it was released for download on Wednesday.
In a statement Friday, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows and devices group, says the company has seen "unprecedented demand" for Windows 10.

"It has been an incredible 24 hours for Windows and our fans," said Mehdi.

Most of the software that's included with Windows 10 is nothing special, but there's one bright spot: Microsoft Edge, the new web browser that finally replaces the much-maligned Internet Explorer.

Edge comes at a crucial time for Microsoft: Internet Explorer has less than 20% share of the browser market, with 1% of the total mobile market, according to the Adobe Digital Index. Meanwhile, Google Chrome leads with 42% of desktop market share, and Apple's Safari holds 58% of the mobile browser market, per the same report.

Even after scaling back its Windows Phone ambitions, Microsoft isn't giving up on getting handsets to run Windows 10. The company will broaden a program in China to let Xiaomi device owners switch their mobile platform from Android.

One of the killer gaming features built in to Windows 10 is that it’ll let you stream games from your Xbox One to your PC. Now it seems that Microsoft wants to make the opposite possible, by letting you stream games from your Windows 10 PC to your Xbox One.

Say you feel like playing Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 on the big screen in your living room, only you don’t have an HTPC. With PC to Xbox One streaming, that wouldn’t be an issue. You’d just tell your Xbox you want to play it, and it’d connect to your PC via your home network just like you might do if you wanted to watch a movie, listen to music, or flip through family photos that were shared with your Homegroup.

Xbox One owners can already stream console games to their Windows 10 PCs - a feature that looks set to win the new OS quite a few fans as it gradually rolls out to millions of users around the world today. However, the ability to stream PC games back to the console isn't yet available - but Microsoft is working on it.

Yesterday, Microsoft finally made Windows 10 for desktop and laptops available, but we still have a few months to wait until Windows 10 Mobile makes its way into the wild. According to the latest indications, this might happen as late as November.

Anyway, while Microsoft might be planning to update most of its Lumia devices to Windows 10, not all phones from this family will get it upon launch.

Sets expiration date of Insider preview for Windows 10 Enterprise as Oct. 1, after which customers must replace with a valid license

Microsoft yesterday offered customers disk image files to do clean installs of and upgrades to Windows 10, and corporate users a way to try the enterprise-grade edition for 90 days free of charge.
The Redmond, Wash. company also announced it will extinguish the Insider program for Windows 10 Enterprise, which some corporate customers have used to test the new OS since 2014.

At some point inside the next 24 hours, Window 10 will “launch” in New Zealand, before spreading out across the globe. To a certain extent. Of course, for the more than 5 million folks currently testing the software, its “launch” is almost a non-event.

For the following cycles of individuals and businesses that will get the code over the coming weeks and months, the start of the launch cycle matters as it dictates the undertaking of the rollout cycle that will get Windows 10 into their hands. But the Midnight Moment, such as it is, doesn’t matter too much. If you wanted Windows 10 a week ago, you could have had it. Still, there is something notable about the end of a liminal state.

...Windows 10 isn’t just a refresh of Windows. It’s a big, ambitious product that will run as a universal operating system on an array of devices. It’ll power everything from phones to tablets to 80-inch touchscreens. It’ll power a new array of household appliances that connect to the internet. It’ll even power computers you strap to your face.

Windows 10 is here! Windows 10 is here! Now what?
By now, you’ve seen our review of Windows 10. It’s one of the best operating systems Microsoft has ever produced, and it’s worth the download. But if you’re new to Windows 10, it can feel a bit daunting.

Actually, it’s more familiar than you think. And we can help walk you through your first 30 minutes with Windows 10.

Virtual assistants have become commonplace in modern technology, but Microsoft thinks it knows how to push its Cortana a step beyond the rest.

We live in a world where we're starting to talk to our computers, but it still feels like the device on the receiving end is a machine. Microsoft believes it's begun solving that with Cortana.

The Internet-connected service, which lives inside Microsoft's new Windows 10 software out Wednesday, will be the first assistant at the beck and call of PC users across the globe. It's based on the advanced artificial intelligence character in the Microsoft-owned video game saga Halo, but it's widely available to anyone with the company's new operating system.

The best thing about Windows 10 is that it's simply Windows, through and through. It's as if Microsoft realized that devaluing the desktop in Windows 8 was akin to sacrilege, and Windows 10 is its penance. At its core, it's a union of the best qualities of Windows 7 and Windows 8 -- the desktop features of the former with some of the touch-friendly aspects of the latter.

For almost three decades, Microsoft Windows has ruled the oceans of business and consumer computing.

Windows 10, the latest iteration of the (literally) iconic operating system (OS), will start sailing off the shelves at the end of July. Its primary purpose is to unify the OS across PCs, tablets, smartphones and embedded systems, as well as Microsoft’s games console Xbox One, its new interactive whiteboard Surface Hub and its soon-to-arrive head-mounted 3D display HoloLens.

People around the world have started to upgrade their computers to the official version of Windows 10. We want to hear from you. Will you update to Windows 10? Yes, no, maybe? Post a comment below and let us know!

Microsoft’s last version of Windows is finally here: Windows 10 is arguably the best version of the ubiquitous operating system. But the question is, should you upgrade for free immediately? Or will it be another Windows 8 moment?

Windows 10 is a big step towards the Microsoft classic becoming an always-connected operating system for every device, not just PCs, which is continuously updated for free. It’ll run traditional desktop Windows apps, like Windows 7. But it will also run new “universal” apps downloaded from the Windows Store, which Microsoft hopes will become a trusted source of traditional Windows desktop programs as well.

The day has finally come for Windows fans to celebrate the launch of the new Windows 10 operating system. Microsoft's latest platform has been officially released and a select number of users have already received Windows 10 as a free upgrade.

Windows 10 will be available across 190 countries in the next couple of months, either as a free upgrade or with new PCs and tablets.

When Microsoft set out to build Windows 10, the company had a challenge to face: The operating system needed to appeal to the wide swath of people already using Windows.
“We joke on our team that we’re ordering pizza for one-and-a-half billion people,” Mohammed Samji, a principal group program manager at Microsoft, said in an interview.

In order to serve all of those users, Microsoft wanted Windows 10 to work well for people no matter what interface they chose. Windows 8 was criticized by people who thought that Microsoft had moved too much functionality around in order to accommodate and appeal to users of tablets. The company walked back some of the changes with its release of Windows 8.1, but this new update is designed to appeal further to traditional keyboard and mouse users alongside owners of touch devices.

Windows 10, like any new release of Microsoft’s operating system, ranks among the most important events of the year. Windows lost the spotlight years ago, but it’s still the operating system used by the majority of the world’s PCs. What they can and can’t do is still dictated by Redmond’s engineers.

With its previous major release, Windows 8, those engineers made an attempt to expand the operating system to touch-capable devices for the first time, adding an entirely new way to interact. Those devices now make up 40 percent of all new computers sold, according to Microsoft. Yet the transition was rough. Both desktop and touch users felt left out.

On the eve of the Windows 10 launch, the excitement is starting to build. Many consumers are preparing for the upgrade. After all, for Windows 7 and 8 users, this will be a free affair.
For the most part, unless you are using something very obscure, most of your existing programs should work fine.

Tomorrow, Microsoft releases Windows 10 to the general public as a free upgrade.
It's impossible not to draw parallels between today's launch and the hugely hyped release of Windows 95, which happened 20 summers ago.

At that Windows 95 launch party, with entertainment by Jay Leno and the accompaniment of the Rolling Stones, it felt like the end of a long journey. Windows 95 was shrink-wrapped, for heaven's sake, so it could sit on store shelves and bins at Costco. And you knew that it wasn't going to change much for another three years, which is how long it took for Windows 98 to arrive.

In less than 24 hours, Microsoft will start upgrading Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines to Windows 10. The software giant is preparing for this big release, at 12AM ET on July 29th (9PM PST on July 28th), by pre-loading the final version of Windows 10 on PCs eligible for the upgrade. A number of Windows 7 and Windows 8 users who have registered for the upgrade have started noticing that the full installer files for Windows 10 have been downloaded to C:\$windows.~BT as Microsoft gets ready for release.

The Surface line of computers are amazing machines. Whether you choose the less-powerful (yet more compact) Surface 3 or more powerful and larger Surface Pro 3, you are sure to be happy with your decision. They are truly the best way to experience Windows on the go.

Unfortunately, they require Wi-Fi for internet connectivity. While some people can share their smartphone's connection with the Surface, not everyone has that ability. Plus, tethering can quickly drain the phone's battery too. An LTE- enabled model would be ideal. Well, that is soon to become a reality. The long-promised Surface 3 LTE is coming to AT&T on July 24th. In just a few days you can buy the portable machine of your dreams.

Microsoft has released a critical patch for a security flaw found in Windows that could allow hackers to take complete control of a user's machine.
Classed as a critical vulnerability, Microsoft's highest rated threat, the company said in a security bulletin "an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."

The vulnerability affects Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and 8.1 and Windows RT, according to a security bulletin posted by Microsoft.

Following the bell, Microsoft reported its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, including revenue of $22.2 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.62.
The company took a stiff charge in the quarter relating to its writedown of hardware assets that it purchased from Nokia. Using normal accounting methods, Microsoft had operating income of negative $2.1 billion in the quarter. Analysts had expected Microsoft to report $0.56 in per-share, adjusted profit, on revenue of $22.06 billion.

The company’s revenue fell from 5 percent a year-ago tally of $23.382 billion, due in large part to a slipping phone-related top line. In total, using normal accounting techniques, Microsoft lost $3.2 billion in quarter, or $0.40 per share. In contrast, the company had regular profit of $4.6 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Microsoft Office is the best office suite on the planet. Nothing annoys me more than when someone suggests that LibreOffice is a comparable solution. If you are a home user, sure, you can get by with a limited word processor and spreadsheet offering. If you are a business owner, however, you are crazy to use anything other than Microsoft Office.

Today, GE -- one of the world's most respected companies -- announces that it chose Microsoft Office 365 for its 300,000+ employees. Not only is GE's decision very wise, but it is a huge win for Microsoft too.

I was a freshman in college when modern video games and faster dialup modems were revolutionizing the personal computer landscape. That year, Microsoft Windows 95 launched. While the new OS was riddled with performance issues and hardware compatibility nightmares, millions of people worldwide updated (or upgraded) their computers. I was one of those nerds who lined up outside of a local CompUSA for the midnight opening and sale of Windows 95. By the time I left the store, very few copies remained.

On July 29, Microsoft will launch the latest version of its operating system. Windows 10 has a lot of things going for it. Marking twenty years since Windows 95, the version number gives it a symbolic importance, but more importantly, it seems that Microsoft has learned from its past mistakes, promising to showcase the best from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 and to add exciting new features to create a solid operating system.

If you haven’t tried the preview versions of Windows 10 or had a chance to read about the new and improved features, here’s a brief list for you:

For many, Windows 10 will be a free update.

The user interface will feature the return of the Start menu button, and it will add Windows Metro (Windows 8 and 8.1) functionality.

Windows Metro apps will run in full screen or windowed mode.

Microsoft Edge will replace Internet Explorer. The new browser will feature several security upgrades and greater speed. Word has it that the good folks at Mozilla are working hard on a new update to keep up with Microsoft’s new browser.

Xbox integration and DirectX 12. This is key for gamers: Windows will now have direct integration with Xbox, allowing some Xbox Live games to stream directly into a PC for full playability.

Cortana, a SIRI-like virtual assistant, will be integrated into the operating system and into Microsoft Edge.

User custom settings will synchronize seamlessly with tablets and phones running the latest version of Windows.

Face and fingerprint recognition as an alternative to typing passwords.

In addition to these, there are many more features under the hood that deal with stability, compatibility, and security. Patch Tuesday will end, and Microsoft will push updates on demand 24/7. This is one issue that has created some controversy: the logic behind the mandatory updates is based in Microsoft’s approach to security breaches and a desire to place Windows at the forefront of user security and to give users some peace of mind.

In closing, whether you are an avid Microsoft Windows fan like me or you are simply curious about the upcoming version, Windows 10 is taking the best from Windows 7 and 8.1 and adding new features that should attract desktop, mobile, and tablet users alike. Many things have changed since Windows 95 was launched, but for me the excitement and eagerness to install the latest Windows OS has not. This time, however, I will not have to wait for a midnight opening outside a mega computer store in order to get my upgrade.

Erick Cordero Giorgana lives in Alaska and is a Management & Political Consultant. He worked briefly as an Information Technology Manager for a public relations firm before switching careers and working for the nonprofit sector and then for the state government. He is an amateur photographer and a long-time volunteer at ActiveWin.com and other blogs.

On July 19, Microsoft kicked off its promised multi-million-dollar Windows 10 ad campaign with spots emphasizing the operating system's potential impact on a new generation.

Microsoft posted the Windows 10 TV ad to YouTube on Sunday night. The ad campaign will go live in six markets -- U.S., U.K., France, Japan Australia and Germany -- starting Monday. In the U.S., it will air across all the major networks. The campaign will go live in the rest of the world starting on July 29, the day Windows 10 begins rolling out.

Microsoft has released an emergency update to patch a security bug that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers running every supported version of Windows.

The critical vulnerability, which is present in all supported version of Windows, involves the way the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library handles fonts that use Microsoft's OpenType format. The bug allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable computers. Attackers can exploit it by luring targets to booby-trapped websites or by tricking a target into opening a malicious file.